In Which Normal Becomes Precious
by OnWithTheButter
Summary: "I was a normal kid…but that all changed. …I grew fascinated with what happened to him, and several years later, that's how I found myself with an internship at a mental hospital and halfway house." human!AU, loads of -hopefully accurately portrayed- mental illness, somewhat of a PSA-type story
1. Prologue

I, Timo Väinämöinen, was a normal kid. I had a normal family, living in a normal neighborhood, attended a normal school, had normal friends, in a normal suburb. I was content with this normality, and had plans to get a normal four-year higher education, meet and marry a normal girl, have a normal family and a normal career, and live happily — as well as normally — ever after.

But that all changed, about half way through high school. My 'normal' best friend was becoming noticeably less and less normal. He had always been the shy one, and come to think of it now, maybe the signs were always there and we didn't notice. Over the summer, he had started to withdraw, but I didn't think much of it as he had had social troubles during the school year. I thought it was just his introversion and he just wanted to have a little alone time.

Since we were in first grade, we had been close friends. We lived in the same neighborhood and our parents had befriended each other too. Everyone joked that we were those two misfitted friends who were so different, but would stick together for our entire lives. I was always outgoing, talkative and popular, he was always the quiet, reserved loner.

After that summer, he stopped confiding his secrets with me, grew nervous, his grades slipped and he would go days without even showing up for school. It was so unlike him, he was a star student with a near-perfect attendance record. And when I say 'star student', I'd point out that he's over a year younger than me and had always been a grade ahead of his age, very brilliant. I kept asking if he was okay, and he's only answer vaguely, saying he couldn't talk about it. I asked him to talk to a counselor, but he refused and even started avoiding being anywhere near them. I expressed my worries to his parents, and they had agreed that something very strange was happening to their son.

It was almost winter when he pulled me aside at lunch. He told me that 'they' were out to get him, 'they' knew that he was saying things he shouldn't. I didn't know how to react, so I nervously laughed and told him not to watch so many conspiracy theory videos. He panicked and tried to explain to me that it wasn't like that, that there was something very real wanting to harm him. He told me that I couldn't tell anyone else what he had told me, because they wouldn't understand or they would get him into even bigger trouble. He told me that even confessing this to me could be a death sentence.

I tried to keep his secret, just like every other one I had kept, but it was eating away at me. This was no joke, he truly believed that someone was out to get him. I started noticing him staring at things, reacting to what seemed to be nothing, and it became even more obvious to me that he was very, very off. He wasn't himself. He was terrified, and it scared me. This was one secret I couldn't keep for him. I had to tell a counselor everything, including that I couldn't have him find out that I had told. It wasn't long after that that his parents took him to a psychiatrist, who quickly diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia.

Before then, I had been one of the sixty-something percent of people who misinformedly thought that schizophrenia was the same as multiple personalities, as well as another large majority who feared and stigmatized the mentally ill unnecessarily. It was hard for me to accept that _my best friend_ had his mind practically split from reality, that _my best friend_ was hearing voices and seeing things that didn't exist. How could that happen to my 'normal' best friend?

It was crazy. As soon as word spread about his illness, he was avoided, even by people who used to be his friends. The others whispered about him. I was made fun of for being the only one willing to remain his friend. He himself refused to believe that anything was wrong with him, or that what he was experiencing wasn't real.

From then on, I didn't look for normality. Sure, I wished quietly and only to myself that things hadn't turned out this way and that my life had stuck to my plans, but wishes don't change reality. It was hard enough to see what was happening to someone I cared for, without hearing the mocking or watching him by singled out. It wasn't his fault. And I know he wasn't the only one. The more I learned, the more I saw that in this cruel world, people like him suffer even more at the hands of others, and they shouldn't. It's hard enough to suffer with mental illness without society treating them like dirt, acting as if a victim is somehow at fault, like they're some sort of evil plague.

My best friend struggled to finish school, but by his own tenacity, he did. After that, he fell apart again. He had reached a finish line, so to speak. His parents were already getting old, too old to care for him in the way he needed. They tried, and it broke their hearts to have their efforts turn to nothing. He had become suicidal. The best thing for him was to let him learn to cope in a psychiatric hospital, where he could be surrounded and cared for by people who knew what to do for him, or at least could understand what he was going through.

As for me, I was too affected to sit back and watch. I changed my life plans. I learned that maybe there isn't a standard of normality in this world. I was described as tunnel-visioned in my stabs at making a difference. No more 'normal college education', I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to help. I've attended medical school as well as been trained in basic psychiatry. I grew fascinated with what happened to him, and several years later, that's how I found myself with an internship at a mental hospital and halfway house.

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**A/N: orz This plot bunny wouldn't leave me alone… So. I don't expect to actually start writing this story for a while, at least until I'm finished with my story 'All Madmen are Not the Same', mostly because I really don't want to have two stories simultaneously that are so similar, but also because I don't have all of the notes and such gathered yet.  
**

**Look at me writing a fanfic designed to inform and educate. Aha, it's actually not the first one, or the second one. I'm officially labeling such fanfics as my fanPSAs.  
**

**Yeah, like how I purposefully didn't reveal who the best friend is? XD I even deleted the notes for this story off of my livejournal to hide it.  
**

**~Butter~  
**


	2. Chapter 1

**A/N: Ah…I know I said I wasn't going to write this until I finish All Madmen are Not the Same, but…the idea wouldn't leave me alone. So I wrote this.**

**Important info: None of the characters in the story are related (no brothers, sisters, cousins, whatever). I don't necessarily use canon human names (for different reasons). Every illness portrayed in the story has a valid reason why I chose it, and I'm likely not going to explain them unless I found it really clever. I'm not trying to be offensive to any nationalities, I'm simply writing a fictional story that revolves about mental disorder. If that might offend you, the browser has a back button. I didn't use every single Hetalia character because I ran out of ideas, and some of the characters left out are some of my favorites too unu. There will be no romance whatsoever, because that stuff just makes me mad ouo.**

**Human names in this chapter (I'll add more as I introduce more characters):**

**Norway - Sigurd**

**Sweden - Brendt (because Berwald is neither a name nor Swedish uwu)**

**Denmark - Mathias**

**Iceland - Egil (yes yes, it's actually Egill. Anglicization because ll sound)**

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Mental disorder, by the simplest definition, is patterns or disturbances of thought that interferes significantly with daily life. One of the first things I learned was that one in three, maybe more, people will suffer from a mental illness at some point of their life. Too many don't realize or are too scared to find help, and only end up with destructed lives. Even more decide to keep their illness a secret, fearing the social stigma, and although they have treatment, never gain understanding.

I'd heard of this stigma over and over, watching it play out as my best friend was ostracized, and then it hit me personally when I started my internship. More often than I want to say, the response to my explaining my work is some form of "So you work with the crazies?", and frequently followed by "Aren't you scared that they'll try to hurt you?" Most of these patients are as violent as the average person, that is to say, not really at all. They aren't the common image of lunatics either. For the most part, these are average people, differing only because they suffer. If they lash out against anyone, it's more often than not themselves. They're the ones we should want to help, not the ones we fear.

Even though he suffers from one of the less common and most devastating mental illnesses, I use Sigurd, my best friend, as my example because I saw him change from the friend I played hide-and-seek with, that I studied with, that shared everything with me and I with him. I had to hold back my tears when he confessed that one of the voices he heard kept telling him that he hated me, and sincerely asked me to kill him if he ever threatened me. I saw him cry and scream and beg me to be real because he could no longer tell what reality was and feared that he was a puppet in the fiction of his life because he felt he could no longer control himself. I helped restrain him when he was hospitalized three years ago and fell into hysterics, honestly believing that the nurses and doctors were trying to kill him. If there's one thing he would never do, it's hurt someone of his own free will.

It's been five years since that summer. I'm twenty-two years old now, Sigurd twenty-one. Even after his life fell apart and I desperately tried to pick up the pieces for him, I attempted to be that normal guy for the first few years. We graduated together, me toward the top of the class, him barely passing. I went on to medical school, swearing to help the next Sigurd before it was too late, he could never have handled more schooling and shut himself up at home. I struggled to balance study and life and being there for him when I could, he struggled to continue to simply live. He dissolved into screaming matches with the invisible, lying around for days on end, refusing to let anyone outside of his personal 'bubble' even look at him.

It was autumn, a few months after he turned eighteen, when his parents found him unconscious, 'I can't play this game' the words on a post-it note stuck to the back of his hand. An attempted suicide by drug overdose. He later confessed that he had stopped taking his antipsychotics about a month before then, originally washing them down the drain, later stockpiling them to the eventual attempt to cut off his life. Why? He told his parents that it was the only action he could think of that was independent of the fake reality he felt like he was in.

The failure to die must have been horrifying. He believed himself to be controlled by external sources, incapable of making his own choices, and that he was still alive was like the powers he believed in denied him escape from the hell they put him through.

He was hospitalized for several months after that, to get him somewhat stabilized. Psych ward was hard on him, constantly surrounded by people he couldn't trust. By late spring, he was on a visible path of recovery. The voices waned, some days there, some days leaving him in peace. He resembled a normal human again, or at least a dull one. His panic attacks were infrequent, but he sunk into melancholy, quietly fearing another episode of acute psychosis. He didn't require the constant supervision and treatment that the hospital provided. As I previously said, his parents couldn't care for an ill son at their age. The hospital system has a program for the struggling mentally disordered, a halfway house where they could have care available around the clock by trained staff, and try to integrate back into to 'normal' society. From early that summer, nearly a year after his attempted suicide, till now, this is where my best friend has resided. And as of a month ago, this is where I work as an intern.

Nowadays, Sigurd doesn't believe that his life is controlled by someone else, but he does till feel like he's in a separate reality. He's plagued by four recurring, disembodied voices, that is to say, audible to his ears, yet coming from within his own mind. They don't always torment him, most days providing an irritating but mundane narration of what happens, some days falling quiet, and few days actually threatening him anymore. He's still immensely paranoid and prefers to keep to himself rather than expose himself to the perceived threats of most people. And he's still called a suicidal risk. The psychiatrists don't have a good outlook for him, predicting he will need care for many more years, maybe the rest of his life.

He shares a living space with three others, who individually have three entirely different sets of issues. Now I say this, what I know about every other patient is mostly a mixture of the basics that aides are given and the personal stories I have been told by the people themselves. It's never not going to be strange to me how so many of them willingly share their stories with me.

Mathias and Brendt have been here since before Sigurd. They're kind of the 'those two guys' of E5 (that's the apartment-type home that their group lives in). They're the same age, have been there the longest of the four, and by all appearances should be best friend, but they're not. It's not that they don't get along, but they don't exactly mesh well together either. The whole system is like that in a way, the oddest characters stuck together and made to put up with each other. I'll just say that in working here, there's never a dull moment. E5 is such a good example of this circus, with two of the guys deeply needing and desiring companionship, the other two shrinking away from others at every opportunity.

Right, I'll be introducing to you some of the characters I work with, starting with Brendt.

Brendt was orphaned as a very young child and since, has never had a real home. He wasn't a bad kid, just a misunderstood and horribly quiet one. At least, that's what I gather. With one foster family for a few months, back to the orphanage, on to another family, and rejected again. The one couple that would have kept him had a family disaster, didn't have the means to adopt him formally, and ended up having to leave him behind as they moved away. He has dependent personality disorder, which means he pushes away responsibility and decision-making onto others, as he doesn't trust himself with his own life. As he has no real family or friends out in society, this is where he has been placed.

Of course, with having a close friend here, my experiences with E5 date past my working here. I remember clearly the first time I came to visit Sigurd, I was faced with a seemingly off-the-wall "Can I have a sandwich?" from Brendt, followed by "Can I make you a sandwich?" It was frankly weird coming from a stranger. I was later told by aides that he gravitated toward me, watching me visit my friend until he sprung the questions on me as I got ready to leave. They also said, and I've confirmed this by working with him nearly every day, that he never forgot my name, asking Sigurd when I'd come back to see them. Yes, 'them'. He's quite fond of me, if you can't tell by now. It's not that unusual for people with DPD to become attached to others very quickly. But still, it was a very odd first encounter, as he's a big, tall guy, and comes off as intimidating. Also, he's really quite shy, nervous of driving people away, and sensitive.

Then there's Mathias. The son of aloof parents that has tried desperately to fit in all of his life. Who knows why he was never accepted. Starting from kindergarden, none of the other children wanted anything to do with him, perhaps finding him overbearing, a pattern that followed him to adulthood. He's not a bad guy at all, but he lacks social experience and is almost in desperation in trying to get along with others.

From his late teens, Mathias has suffered from recurrent brief depression. Most of the time, he is genuinely fine, but it is oh so easy for something to tip the scale and bring him to paralyzing depression, though he bounces back from it within a few days. On top of that, he was constantly told to get over himself, leading him to feel like a broken, worthless human. His parents never saw him as ill, only as over-dramatic. Three years ago, he too tried to take his own life, stopped by a complete stranger before he jumped off the bridge. He's told me again and again that he really wants that stranger to come back to see him because she was the first one who cared. Since that incident, his subsequent hospitalization, and his move to the halfway house, he hasn't communicated with his family, they haven't attempted to contact him and he returns the favor. It's probably the best for him, since the mere subject of the family who rejected him is enough to deject him.

He really is doing quite well now. He's made friends, built up his self-confidence, and is almost ready to try the real world again. He's on proper medication and learned tricks to overcome the blued that plague him. In a way, I'm almost sad to think of him leaving, his cheery demeanor and playful boisterousness always provides so much for everyone here. But I'm proud of him. For someone almost entirely unrelated, I really am. In the two or so years that I've known him, I've seen him recover and grow, and it honestly gives me hope that not all is lost in this stranger place.

Last but not least, Egil is the youngest and newest resident of E5. I know relatively little about him. In the few months he's been here, he rarely even shows his face. His issue is avoidant personality disorder, which I like to think of as the flip side of the coin to DPD, both stemming from anxiety, yet manifesting in two opposite ways. Typically, avoidant personalities are afraid of rejection and criticism to the point that they isolate themselves. They see themselves as not good enough or as unwanted and have given up completely.

Egil has been here over two-thirds of a year and by all signs is not improving a bit. His aunt, who raised him from a toddler, once gave me a basic outline of his life. He dropped out of high school and finished his education online. He objectively avoided seeing a psychiatrist for years because he was afraid of being told that something was wrong with him, and even after the diagnosis, seems to be in denial of it. Fearing that he'd end up hurting himself, his aunt has bargained with him to stay here and receive treatment until he can learn to cope. So far…he's refusing to accept it. I foresee this as being a long and painful journey for him. I wish at times that I could talk to him and try to help, but I doubt that happens any time soon.

Usual days for me include waking up early to work on my studying, attend classes if applicable, occasionally try to make it out to lunch with friends, and then to work. My hours now are one to nine. My first order of business is to stop by to see Sigurd before I start my duties, so I will sometimes come early if I want to spend any amount of time with him. Today, I arrived only ten minutes early.

I knocked as usual, to be answered by Brendt's gruff-sounding "C'm in." Mathias was asleep on the couch, Brendt with a book in his lap, looking to be bored out of his mind. Unsurprisingly, our two little recluses weren't in sight.

"Sig's with the lil guys," Brendt informed me immediately, pointing a thumb toward the bedroom. If you were wondering, Egil actually shares a room with Mathias, and Sigurd with Brendt.

I headed toward the open door of Egil and Mathias' room, announcing myself with a "Knock, knock." Both of them simply raised their heads and acknowledged me without even a facial gesture. Like usual, Egil was lying on his bed with his laptop, and Sigurd was merely standing beside him, watching over his shoulder.

After a few seconds, Sigurd suddenly stood up and started toward the door. As he passed me, he mumbled an incoherent sound, followed by "Come look," and headed to the kitchen, where he pulled out a bag and tossed it to me. Hard, strong licorice. "I went shopping with Mathias this morning and he had to pick up some of that for Egil, so I got you some too," he explained.

"That stuff is potent, man!" came a loud voice from the front. Oh, Mathias had awoke. "I like licorice as much as the next guy, but that's dangerous!"

I laughed. "You must have such a weak stomach, these are the best!" I retorted playfully, quietly thanking Sigurd afterward.

Brendt got up then, coming over to us. "Can I try some? Lil guy eats it no t'morrow and I've wondered…" I opened the bag, offering a piece to him. With his first bite into it, he grimaced, looking angry (well, _angrier_). After a pause and a few more chews, his expression returned to default and he nodded. "'Tisn't that bad, Mat."

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**A/N: Cookies and stuff for Nony for guessing Norway as the best friend on her first guess. uwub Hmm…I guess I could give away more free cookies and stuff if people want to take stabs at my reasoning behind applying certain disorders to certain characters. Which means Nony gets more cookies and stuff for correctly guessing this on the prologue. Some of these are going to be very easy ahaha**

**Gah, I have such mixed feelings about this chapter being so long.**

**I have so many good ideas for this fic ahaha and yet only seven of forty-one patient!characters completely planned out with histories and bios and stuff. It's a painful world when you decide to write a fic with forty-two characters. I'm also rubbing my hands together with a creepy grin waiting for someone to cry over something I write. …Yeah. /shot**

**Oh, and lastly, I try my best to portray the illnesses as accurately as possible, but no one person suffers the same way and some cases may be slightly dramatized for the sake of displaying this. I really am warning you people, there's two suicide attempts in this chapter and there will be more. I'm being bleak here. No rose-colored glasses for you.**

**~Butter~**


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